MasterCard Outage Apparently Not Caused By Hackers

Credit card services provider MasterCard has clarified that the outage its website suffered on Tuesday was not caused by a DDoS attack launched by hackers.

When the website first went down on Tuesday, Anonymous supporters across the web celebrated the outage on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Even the official WikiLeaks Twitter account celebrated the outage with a Tweet. But apparently that's not what happened.

The company said that the recent outage was caused by a fault at MasterCard’s Internet Service Provider. MasterCard failed to highlight the problem or the ISP that caused it but maintained that it was not the work of hackers, The Washington Post reports.

“MasterCard's corporate, public-facing Website experienced intermittent service disruption, due to a telecommunications/Internet Service Provider outage that impacted multiple users,” the company said in a an emailed statement.

Back in December, MasterCard’s website was struck online by a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack launched by the hacktivist group Anonymous.

The group said that the attack was in protest of MasterCard isolating WikiLeaks at the behest of the US government. Anonymous also targeted other companies with DDoS attacks including Visa, PayPal and Amazon for withdrawing support for WikiLeaks.